Another Way to Learn
October 30, 2012
In 2000, I had the pleasure of listening to a speech by Ken Dryden, who had been goalkeeper for Cornell University when it was the NCAA Ice Hockey Champion in the 1960s. Ken Dryden then was a goalkeeper in the National Hockey League for eight years. Then president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and he’s a lawyer.
Ken Dryden said that the greatest lesson of sport is that most things go wrong; in fact, that they almost always go wrong. He said he’s seen dozens of coaches on hundreds of occasions diagram plays in the locker room where every defender is blocked just so and every pattern is executed perfectly.
But what you learn in competition, said Dryden, is that the plans almost always go awry, that the patterns almost always break down. What you learn in competition is to not get upset, but to improvise and find another way to get the puck in the goal or the ball in the net.
What happens to the high school student, asked Dryden, who doesn’t play sports in high school and who gets all A’s, a 4.3 grade point average on a 4 point scale, 100 percent on test scores all the time, who never has anything go wrong? What happens to that student in college when he or she gets 90 percent, or 80 percent, or worse. What happens to that student when something goes wrong in life?
Dryden concluded that sport is not frivolous, it’s another way to learn.
The Usual Suspects
December 30, 2016
It is difficult to find a year when the 11-player Football Finals of the Michigan High School Athletic Association involved more teams from southeast Michigan than appeared at Ford Field in 2016. In fact, just two counties (Oakland and Wayne) produced seven finalists. But then two counties on Michigan’s west side (Kent and Muskegon) supplied four of the 16 finalists.
Four of Michigan’s 83 counties producing 11 of 16 finalists in the 11-player championship games doesn’t’ feel like a statewide event; but one team from the Upper Peninsula, another from the Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest portion of the Lower Peninsula, and a team located along the Michigan/Ohio border remind us how large and diverse our state really is.
The 2016 MHSAA 11-player Football Finals consisted of many of the “usual suspects,” including two teams pursuing their fourth straight titles and one team seeking its third consecutive championship. Four of the eight 11-player champions from 2015 returned in the attempt to defend their titles in 2016, and two of the runners-up in 2015 were back to try to reverse their fortunes from 12 months earlier.
What is being demonstrated here in Michigan high school football is the trend seen in many other states. That is, as the number of classes or divisions of tournaments expands, the more often you see the same teams in the final rounds.
The surest way to have the “usual suspects” on championship day is to put them in tournaments with fewer schools. And of all MHSAA tournaments, the football playoffs have the most divisions with the fewest schools in each. The result is predictable.
This is a cautionary tale for those who desire that the number of classifications and divisions be expanded in MHSAA tournaments for other sports.
Meanwhile, we are keeping an eye on the tournament format in a neighboring state that places schools into divisions for larger schools after they are too successful over consecutive years in the classification that fits their enrollment. Those in Michigan who have been assigned to review such policies have complained that such “success factors” penalize future students because of the achievements of previous students and/or because such factors do nothing about “chronic success” by schools in the largest classification.